Find out how to fix the infamous Wifi Problem Mountain Lion quest. Apparently, there seem to be quite a few Wifi problems with Mountain Lion OSX. In my case, on a Macbook Air (Late 2010) the Wifi connection was constantly having timeouts, but had worked flawlessly with the same router before with older OSX versions. As a result, websites were not loading and needed to be refreshed again or Skype calls were interrupted or disconnecting. Other users have problems with big file downloads/transfers.
Googling for “Mountain Lion Wifi problem” yields over 1 million hits, with many discussions in supports forums and so on. When I first encountered this problem I tried different suggested solutions without success. Eventually, to downgrade the Wifi drivers to an older version with a kext utility fixed the wifi problem for me. This approach has been posted here and updated once here. This solution worked fine, just until before the release OSX 10.8.4, which officially claims to solve some of the Wifi problems. Unfortunately, this version did not solve the Wifi problem for me at least. Furthermore, even worse the kext downgrade was no longer working. So I had to search again and found yet another solution, that replaces the service “airportd” with an older version. However, after exchanging the airportd file, my Wifi was no longer working at all and the system tray was acting very weird and not showing the time, battery, bluetooth and Wifi status. I was a bit afraid that I somehow messed up my system and might have to do a full install. In the end however, it just turned out to be a permission problem. You need to make sure that the older airportd file gets set to the right permissions: “-rwxr-xr-x (755), owner:root, group:wheel”.
So here are once more all steps summarized:
- Download older drivers and kext utility
- Stop/disable Wifi in system tray
- Install older drivers with kext utility:
- Drag kext in Finder onto the kext utility
- Enter your admin passwort and wait for the kext utility to finish its job
- Make a copy of the automatically backed up original kext (because this will be overwritten, if kext utility is run again)
- Download older airportd and replace newest version:
- Backup original airportd: “sudo mv /usr/libexec/airportd /usr/libexec/airportd.old
- Copy older airportd: “sudo cp airportd /usr/libexec/airportd”
- Change permissions for airportd: “sudo chmod 755 /usr/libexec/airportd”
- Reboot
- Activate Wifi again
Hallo Sebastian, ich habe Deinen Bericht über die wifi Probleme mit 10.8.4 gelesen.
Da ich kein Computer Freak bin, mein Englisch auch nicht perfekt, würde ich mich über Deine Kontaktaufnahme und Hilfestellung sehr freuen. Ich lebe in Paraguay und kann mit allen iDevices (Airbook,iPhone,iPad) auf's WLAN zugreifen ausser mit meinem iMac. Ich habe schon Stunden damit verbracht dieses Problem mit 10.8.5 zu lösen, aber ich bekomme es nicht hin.
Besten Dank und freundliche Grüsse, Markus